Mobile Phones and Global Health Link Drop

Over the last year there I have noticed a tremendous up-tick in mobile phones for health/global health stories. The innovation in this area has been worldwide and the sense I get is that use outside the US and in developing countries is far more creative and wide ranging (I haven’t done the research, but this is probably a case where a country like the US will be taking lessons from less developed regions or the “South” as people love to say). We did a previous link drop on SMS/Text Messaging for Global Health that you should check out. Below I begin with two links about the power of mobile phones in general followed by recent links in a plethora of areas from countries around the world. Enjoy:

New NextBillion MIT Network: “Eventually there will be more cell phone users than people who read and write.” —Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google. The goal of the Next Billion Network is to deploy innovative mobile technologies that help people reduce friction in their local markets from the bottom up. (Link)

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Telemedicine and Monitoring AIDS Treatment in Africa (Link)
“With software developed by Ericsson and phones donated… health workers can call up the medical records of pregnant women from an online database and then, by cell phone, tell care-givers what to do during an emergency…”

Another story on the above: A toll-free mobile service being launched in selected remote areas in Africa promises to save lives by connecting people with emergency medical cases to health personnel. (Link)

STOMP (STop smoking Over Mobile Phone): “Clinical trials have shown that using STOMP doubled reported quit rates from 13% to 28% after six weeks“. This would be of tremendous use in LDC’s as smoking is a serious global health issue. (Link)

Cardiomobile exercise and monitoring system: “The Cardiomobile system works by the patient attaching to their chests a mini ECG (electrocardiogram or heart signal) monitor and wearing a cap with a lightweight GPS receiver, both connected to a mobile phone via Bluetooth.” (Link) ; mini ecg picture (Link)

Mental Health Monitoring: Mobile phones and the internet will soon be used to help up to two million Australians manage their mental health problems. (Link)